By James W. Porter II, President
FAIRFAX, Va. –-(Ammoland.com)- “Government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
President Abraham Lincoln’s words in the Gettysburg Address are doubtless the most succinct summation of the miracle established by the founders of our Republic.
But with the combination of President Barack Obama’s rogue executive branch and his rubber-stamp U.S. Senate majority running interference, President Lincoln’s hallowed words no longer resonate.
Obama promised “change,” and that surely is what he’s given us—all bad, all the time. Obama and his legions have accomplished his “change” with the complicity of the U.S. Senate majority headed by Majority Leader Harry Reid, who rules that body with an iron fist. Had the Senate majority been different, Obama’s lawlessness would have been checked.
“We the people,” as voters—as Americans who care most deeply about the future of our Republic—can end this distortion of democracy. In a few short days, on November 4 2014, we can bring our own brand of change.
We can vote to change the Obama-cloned majority of the Senate and we can vote to retain the responsible members of the U.S. House of Representatives who are resisting Obama’s threat to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Much of the unlawful, scandalous, abuse of power that marks the Obama out-of-control bureaucracies has been exposed to the light of day through unstinting oversight by House committees.
Among Obama’s multiple lies to the American people, his promise to create the “most transparent” administration in history ranks with “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.” Instead he has created the most opaque administration in history—tainted by serial cover-ups of misconduct and malfeasance, with obstruction of Congressional oversight at every turn.
Let me paraphrase what are perhaps the most dangerous words written into law: “The Secretary shall write such rules and regulations deemed necessary to carry out the purpose of this act.” Agencies now see such language as license to manufacture power to self-define, or ignore, or reinvent the intent of Congress.
The Federal Register last year published 26,417 pages of agency edicts comprising 3,659 separate rules. That doesn’t include the 24,261 notices of rules changes. Currently, there are 3,305 regulations at some stage pending with 63 different federal agencies. (See “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State” at www.cei.org.)
What makes this malignant growth of executive power in the Obama administration so different is that it is outside the law, outside any authority of the national legislature and outside the courts, funded illegally, it is outside any authorization or appropriation by Congress.
On top of that, the Obama bureaucracy is, by fiat, substantially creating law that Congress specifically voted down—everything from EPA unilaterally shutting down power plants that may well leave Americans without electricity, to twisting U.N. treaties into “pacts” to avoid certain U.S. Senate defeat.
Then there is the question of the Obama administration specifically refusing to carry out existing law. Take the ongoing immigration mess with Homeland Security refusing to either seal the border or to deal with the mass invasion of illegal aliens of unknown origins.
In short, under the Obama administration and with the active acquiescence of Obama’s Senate followers the bureaucracy isn’t just bigger, it is corrupted.
Perhaps the best example is the administration’s misdeeds in transforming the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) into a political weapon to silence ordinary Americans who wish to exercise their right to assemble and petition government, or who wish to be fully involved in the political process.
When caught, IRS top officials lied, refused to honor Congressional subpoenas and destroyed massive digital evidence sought under lawful subpoena.
Recently Obama’s head of that disgraced agency, John Koskinen, told a Congressional inquiry, “Wherever we can, we follow the law.”
That one sentence sums up everything that we as voters need to fix. Washington is indeed broken under the Obama crowd, but we can fix it.
There is time if we act, if we get everyone we know who is concerned or afraid for the future of the nation to the ballot box. If we succeed, we can lead the way to putting our government back on the path defined by President Lincoln— “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
About: Established in 1871, the National Rifle Association is America’s oldest civil rights and sportsmen’s group. Nearly five million members strong, NRA continues to uphold the Second Amendment and remains the nation’s leader in firearm education and training for law-abiding gun owners, law enforcement and the armed services.Visit: www.nra.org